Someone once told me, “Ovaltine is good for you.  It’s full of vitamins.  I give it to my kids every night before bed.”  

We sure do live in a culture that is confused about nutrition to say the least.  On one had we have major companies marketing products like Ovlatine as “a health food” even with it’s sugar, preservatives, synthetic vitamins, and artificial colors and on the other hand we have people drinking their own urine to cure cancer or just get the vitamins their bodies may have missed.  I think both defy good old common sense, although personally I’d drink a gallon of Ovaltine over a teaspoon of urine.  

It really isn’t that difficult to eat healthy.  I’m not talking about a microbiotic diet but a simple whole food diet that follows a few guidelines like don’t sit down and eat 5 pounds of almonds at once. And I’m not saying never drink Ovaltine but don’t drink it for your daily dose of vitamins. But venture into the area of supplements and things get a little trickier.  I try to follow this simple logic. No one (well I’m sure there is someone who would), no reasonable person, would try to argue that white rice is better than brown or Wonder Bread is better than wheat.  It’s pretty much agreed that whole foods are better than refined foods.  The same goes for vitamins. There are whole food vitamins, one’s that are made from, you guessed it, food.  And there are synthetic vitamins, ones that are isolated nutrients, meaning the are not found by themselves in nature, they are created in a lab.  Clearly our bodies are designed to digest food not chemicals.  I’m not a doctor or naturopath so I’m not going to go into the details because I might mess them up and there is plenty of information on the web if you want to do further research.  But I do know my body wants food so when I do take vitamins I take ones that are made from a whole foods.

Here is a list (Yay! I get to write another list!) of vitamins I currently take:
A whole food B complex (I swear it takes the edge of my PMS symptoms)
A whole food multi-vitamin
Evening Primrose (For PMS related acne. So far I’m not sold but going to give it a full 3 months before I draw any conclusions.)
Calcium (I am only taking this because of the absence of dairy in my competition diet)

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